Knowledge or wisdom?

Ancient cultures had traditions of knowledge and wisdom. Chief Seattle’s speech reflects the beliefs of traditional peoples living in nature. Yet, traditional peoples also drove species to extinction, so their fairy tales about respect for nature didn’t help other beings much, either. They lacked the technology to cause as much harm as modern humans. We may think that these so-called primitives and their ways of knowing are inferior to modern science. But knowledge and rationality don’t equal wisdom. In the biblical story of The Fall, rather than listening to God, who knew better, Eve and Adam sought to learn the truth themselves. We wouldn’t be in this mess today or still running naked in the jungle if humans hadn’t acquired so much knowledge. And perhaps, that would have been better.

The Chinese have their tradition and wisdom. Confucius was their best-known philosopher. He lived 2,500 years ago and is still influential today. His teachings comprise moral rules, correct social relationships, justice, kindness, and sincerity. Chinese traditions and beliefs formed the basis of Confucius’ teachings. It was practical in nature. The Chinese Tao is about the natural order of the universe. You can’t understand it with reason, let alone quantify it. You can only grasp it intuitively. The Tao’s path to wisdom is to understand the whole through experience, a spiritual journey. One of the greatest poems ever written is the Tao Te Ching, attributed to the sage Laozi. It begins like this,

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

When you try to express the natural order in words or give it a name, you are astray, or so says the Tao. Doing that disconnects you from the whole of Creation. The Tao is one of the most beautiful poems ever written, expressing a profound wisdom that has few equals. It was written in China during the Warring States Era, the greatest slaughter in the history of humankind that was not to be paralleled until the modern era. In fact, the intense military competition promoted the rationalisation and modernisation of government in China, putting it ahead of the rest of the world for 2,000 years. The conflict was cutting-edge war, with armies larger than the entire Roman army.

The Buddha is an ancient sage who taught that desires trap us in this world of suffering. Once you have what you want, you will desire something new, so you will never be happy. You can escape your suffering and achieve enlightenment with meditation, physical labour and good behaviour. The capitalist consumerist system does the opposite, luring us into buying by creating new desires and keeping us in a permanent state of dissatisfaction through advertisements that show products we do not have and happy people.

The Western tradition is about expressing phenomena in words and quantifying them, and it includes a quest for objective truth. That quest began with the Greek philosophers and ultimately brought us modern science. Wisdom in Greek refers to knowledge and its practical application in life. In the Greek tradition as well, wisdom was regarded as the highest good. Yet, their particular view of wisdom promoted a pursuit of objective knowledge, independent of tradition. The ancient Greeks reasoned that if they knew more, they would become wiser. Today, we know better. We are animals driven by instincts and emotions, so more knowledge only makes us more dangerous to others and ourselves.

The quest for knowledge begins with establishing the facts. You may do so with the help of reason, or so Socrates, the Greek philosopher who lived around 400 BC, believed. He founded the practice of rational debate, also known as dialectics. Socratic debates are discussions between people with different viewpoints who seek to establish the truth through reasoned argument. In his dialogues, Socrates sometimes acted as if he were ignorant. Admitting your ignorance is the first step in acquiring knowledge. That is the hardest part because we like to think we know all we need to know, so after Socrates, it took nearly 2,000 years for the quest for knowledge to really take off. It took a profound cultural change, and the discovery that there was much to discover. After Columbus had discovered America, there was no denying that.

Rationality and progress

When we think of progress, we think of improvements resulting from technological and social changes. Yet there is always a dark side, or as the world-famous Dutch football player Johan Cruijff would say: ‘Every advantage has its disadvantage.’ One invention, such as a new medicine, can cure diseases, whereas another, such as a biological weapon, can kill us. So, are we better off with bioengineering and nuclear power? One social change can make us happy, whereas another can make us miserable. And changes come with winners and losers. We have seen advances in technology and social emancipation. But is that progress? We disagree. What is the point of it if we aren’t happier than our grandparents? And how do we achieve progress? Is it through rational debates and persuasion? Or does it come by force because ideas win in a competition? And is progress something we can decide over? Or do we have no control?

Liberals may view progress as movement toward a desired goal, such as well-being. Christians may view history as moving toward God’s purpose for humanity. We will enter Paradise one day, and all that occurs is necessary to get there. The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who lived around 1800 AD, framed that idea into a philosophical framework. He believed that history has a purpose and that humanity as a whole has a spirit emerging from individual consciousnesses and surrounding ideas, akin to a collective consciousness that drives history. Spirit and collective consciousness are hazy concepts, and his explanation in the Phenomenology of Spirit is complex, speculative, and not particularly enlightening. Yet Hegel’s view that ideas move societies profoundly influenced philosophical and political thought in the centuries that followed.

Hegel was a philosopher of progress. He believed things would get better and that we would, one day, live in a utopia because we would increase our knowledge over time. By reflecting on our thoughts, we can challenge them. Or something might happen that changes your mind. You might believe all swans are white until a black one comes along. From then on, you think most swans are white while some are black. And that is progress. Hegel came up with a three-stage scheme for progress in thought:

1. You believe all swans are white. That is your thesis.
2. There comes a shocker. You see a black swan, the antithesis.
3. Then you think most swans are white, and some are black. It is the synthesis.

That is what progress is about. Hegelian dialectic is an elegant three-stage scheme: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. That makes it enchanting. It is simplistic, and it seems to explain so much. The synthesis might still be incorrect if there are red swans as well, but it is better than the thesis. Hegel applied that scheme to politics and history, and claimed that progress would come through a competition of ideas that included activism, revolution and warfare. That is what made his theory so controversial.

When Hegel developed his views two centuries ago, scientific discoveries began to affect everyday life. The Industrial Revolution had taken off in England, and Enlightenment ideas started to change societies. The American Revolution followed the Glorious Revolution in England. Then came the French Revolution, which ended the old aristocratic regime and mobilised the masses for the first time. The armies of Napoleon conquered Europe and spread Enlightenment ideas across the continent. Hegel was there to witness it, like a fly on the wall, and he was impressed. He viewed Napoleon as the ‘world-spirit on horseback’ embodying the unfolding of history’s rational destiny. He believed the French won out because of superior Enlightenment ideas, and he learned to see history as a struggle towards progress in which better ideas replaced poorer ones.

Law and moral sentiments

Hegel, his views, and his role in history relate to a fundamental philosophical divide in the Western world. Mainland Europe, and most notably Germany, and the Anglo-Saxon world, and most notably the United States, have fundamental differences in their views on law and morality that underpin their societies. These differences greatly influenced history, but their causes also lie in history. In the Middle Ages, individualism was already strong in Western Europe. While England developed its legal system, the Catholic Church’s bureaucracy introduced Roman civil law across the continent. It had the following effect:

• Common law is the basis of the legal system in Great Britain and many of its former colonies, including the United States. Here, individuals are sovereign. Common law works bottom-up by generalising rules from judges’ verdicts in individual cases.
• Civil law is the basis of the legal system in mainland Europe and most other countries. Here, the lawmaker is sovereign, thus the king or, later, the people via parliament. It works top-down by applying general rules to individual cases.

Common law resulted from the efforts of English kings to organise local practices into a coherent law system. In 1215, the nobles forced the English king to accept the Magna Carta, which limited the king’s power. England had a stronger state than mainland Europe. With the Magna Carta, the English nobles limited the king’s power, so that the strong state became based on the rule of law rather than the rule of the king. There was also individual liberty in Western Europe, but in the Middle Ages there were no strong centralised states. Nobles rather than kings held power, while merchants ran independent cities. And the law in Western Europe had a different foundation. That difference relates to views on ethics:

• In Great Britain, philosophy, including ethical philosophy such as that of David Hume, is pragmatic. Moral rules are social agreements, so good and evil depend on popular sentiment, freedom means being able to do as you please, and outcomes matter more than intent.
• In mainland Europe, and most notably in Germany, idealism dominates philosophy, including Kant’s ethical philosophy. Good and evil are absolute. Freedom is liberating yourself from your lower urges to become rational and morally upright. And intent matters more than outcomes.

When ethical rules are relative, they emerge from popular sentiments, thus bottom-up. When they are absolute, they come from general principles and work top-down. By some miraculous accident, or perhaps not, the law systems align with these principles. It is why you have juries rather than professional judges giving verdicts in the Anglo-Saxon world, but less so elsewhere. The English philosopher John Locke imagined the state as a voluntary agreement among individuals to cooperate for mutual benefit. If you believe in individual sovereignty and moral relativism, that must be the reason why there is a state. At the same time, the absolutist French king Louis XIV believed in the divine right of kings. God had created the state and appointed him, so he was accountable only to God.

The progressive or liberal view is that you can do as you please unless you harm others. The conservative view is that morality is founded on tradition or religion. In that sense, there was little difference between Continental Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world, as progressives and conservatives had very similar views in both areas. Still, tradition or religion often comes down to popular sentiment, which aligns more with Anglo-Saxon thinking, whereas doing as you please, unless you harm others, is an absolute moral rule that aligns more with Continental European thinking. And so liberals in Western Europe and conservatives in the United States are on opposite sides of the spectrum, and both may agree that the other side is insane.

These differences also shaped the later debate on the political economy, most notably, the ideological conflict between capitalism and socialism. Adam Smith wrote a practical recipe for running an economy in the pragmatic British tradition. In continental Europe, the debate became fundamentalist and infused with moral sentiments. Frédéric Bastiat, a French writer, argued that socialism is an organised plunder of private property, whereas Karl Marx, a German writer, argued that capitalists steal the value that workers create.

Hegel was an idealist German philosopher in the continental European tradition. Similarly, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant sought an absolute foundation for morality because, as a profoundly religious person, he opposed the moral relativism of British thinkers like David Hume. Hence, the Hegelian dialectic is a ruthless pursuit of truth. The synthesis in the dialectic should be a more profound insight rather than a pragmatic compromise. And that is progress, according to Hegel. You can’t compromise on the truth, but that requires knowing the truth, and that requires letting ideas play out in history. The competition will ensure that the best ideas will win, or so Hegel thought.

Hegel and history

Hegel is the philosopher of progress, not economic or scientific, but progress in public opinion, society and its institutions. It is nearly impossible to overstate his influence on politics in the centuries that followed, as it was about progressives versus conservatives, pitting new ideas from philosophy and the sciences against the status quo. Not all new ideas are better, so the outcome can be that nothing changes or that changes get reversed. Ideally, the synthesis is the best solution that emerges from the challenge of the status quo. If the new ideas are superior, they should wipe out the old ones. That requires revolution and violence, as in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. But what seems a good idea often comes with unforeseen consequences, sometimes so bad that it was not a good idea in hindsight. But hindsight is a bitch. You don’t have it beforehand.

The British reformed more pragmatically in smaller steps. Significant changes can lead to spectacular failures. Seemingly minor oversights can cause ruin. And then, there was the bloodshed during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The leading British conservative at the time, Edmund Burke, sought to improve the government, but only if necessary and preferably in small steps, given the unpredictable consequences of change. The British could do so because their government was already receptive to reform, whereas the French government was not. And to bring that about, the British also had a civil war and a revolution a century earlier. Hence, for the French, a revolution was the only option to terminate the corrupt old regime and clean the slate. In the years that followed, the French state had modernised and improved significantly.

Hegel believed that progress through a competition of ideas, including revolutions and wars, brings us closer to God’s paradise. Karl Marx took the bait. We could achieve paradise ourselves here on Earth without God, he claimed. Scholars had already concluded that much of the Bible was fiction, and Charles Darwin had published On the Origin of Species, which suggested that the world was much older than the Bible claims. The sciences had proven religion wrong, so Marx argued that religion keeps us dumb. Christians would wait for Jesus, who hadn’t shown up for over 1,800 years, and not take matters into their own hands. Marx also noted that Christians had betrayed their religion by adopting the ethics of the merchant. They were becoming like the Jews, Marx wrote. According to Acts, early Christians lived like communists (Acts 2:44-45).

It is not a coincidence that Marxism looks like Christianity, except that there is no God. Rather than let the sheep wait for their saviour, they must rise against their oppressors. And so, ‘the meek will inherit the Earth’ became ‘servile masses arise’ because ‘no saviour from on high delivers.’ Like Christians, Marxists believed there is a plan behind history. Only, they called it a historical necessity. There would be an end time, the proletarian revolution, which would bring us paradise, communism. In other words, the Marxists sought to fulfil Christianity’s promise.

The Communists believed that their ideology was the most scientific, the most advanced, and therefore the most progressive, and therefore superior to conservative bourgeois ideas. For that reason, and because of Hegelian dialectics, we would enter a worker’s paradise. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto,

The Communists are the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: the formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of bourgeois supremacy, and the conquest of political power by the proletariat.

In general, progressives apply scientific findings or the latest insights to government and society or try to emancipate the disadvantaged. Socialists in Europe and progressives in the United States sought to improve workers’ lives. They also used social engineering to improve society, for example by providing neat housing for workers. Or they may argue against prison sentences if research demonstrates that community service prevents recidivism. If people go to prison, they often come out worse. That may be true, but light sentences for causing serious harm, such as fatalities, run counter to popular notions of justice and can undermine the moral fabric of a society. And so, human nature sets a limit to how far you can go in rehabilitating wrongdoers.

Ideas often don’t work out as planned. Communism came with oppression and famines. And so, conservatives want to keep things as they are. Nevertheless, within a dialectical scheme of progress toward a goal, the failure of communism is also a step forward. We now know what will happen if we try it. Yet, as we near a profit-driven apocalypse, we must see communism as the antithesis of capitalism, in the hope of finding a synthesis better than both. It applies to other progressive ideas as well. In most cases, we know enough. Sometimes the advantages outstrip the disadvantages, and sometimes they don’t. And if we don’t know, we can learn by trying. Learning from mistakes is also progress. That argues for experimenting on a small scale before rolling out an idea.

Cultural Marxism

The year 1968 was a year of revolution. The New Left, sometimes called Cultural Marxism, rose to prominence. Believing that the working class had been fully emancipated, the New Left sought out new causes and to liberate other oppressed groups, such as women, minorities, LGBTQ people, and people in countries suffering from Western imperialism and capitalist exploitation. The development would eventually alienate the Western working class from the left, but that would still take decades. These causes have merit, but there are examples of overstepping, some of them quite ludicrous, such as the assertion that mathematics is a form of white oppression, and that traditional teaching methods, such as focusing on single right answers or rigid sequencing, reflect cultural biases. They really teach this kind of stuff in universities. Cultural Marxism also promoted political correctness resembling an Orwellian repression and Newspeak. Cultural Marxism can also lead to oppression. Is it oppression for a good cause, and if so, how far can it go?

The oppression Cultural Marxism fights is real, and it relates to human nature. You only have to see on message boards how men react to women making their own decisions, gay parades, and immigrants. It is human nature, for most places are worse than the West, where Cultural Marxism has had the greatest impact. Male domination is the default in human groups, and humans are xenophobic creatures who despise deviant conduct or people who look differently. And so, the problem is, what is reasonable? In 2026, a survey showed that the acceptance of homosexuals among young people in the Netherlands has dropped, leading to more violent incidents and scoulding, which is due to a series of developments, most notably the rise of jerkism and anti-LGBTQ hysteria. Another issue is the framing of the question, ‘Do you think positively of LGBTQ people?’ That puts the bar quite high.

A report on television showed young men saying things like, ‘I think it is okay to be gay, but don’t bother me with it,’ or, ‘If we should respect their feelings, they should also respect ours.’ These are relatively mild comments. I think LGBTQ people should be respected and be free to be the way they are, and definitely not be scolded or, worse, beaten up, but I don’t like to watch gay pride parades, men making out, or men dressing up as women. I don’t have to watch it, so if people want to do these things, that’s fine with me. Why do I have these feelings? I have grown up in the most liberal country and think of myself as a liberal, so it is not cultural. I even think these feelings are unreasonable. It seems biological, thus in my nature, likely because the biological purpose of sex is reproduction and mating with the wrong kind doesn’t serve that purpose.

More teaching isn’t going to fix that. Despite the anti-smoking campaigns, young people in the Netherlands smoke more. Somehow, more information doesn’t make people smarter. Worse yet, they might get more stupid. Freedom is the right to be a moron, and the requirement to be sensible is a serious infringement on personal liberty. In other words, you don’t have to look far to see why humans are a failed species. Knowing that can increase the LGBTQ community’s understanding of why they are in this pickle. They run into the limits of human nature. They do nothing wrong when they love each other and express their love. In the face of overpopulation, one can even argue that heterosexuality is the problem. So, if LGBTQ propaganda would make people gay, that would be a reason to support it for the benefit of humankind. Yet culture can only go so far in suppressing natural behaviours. If you push harder, the resistance grows. A better understanding of that problem, which it is, can help everyone figure out a way of living that works best for all.

Latest revision: 10 October 2026

Featured image: Portrait of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Jakob Schlesinger (1831). Public Domain.